When it comes to designing a good employee survey, asking the right questions is the best way to ensure you get the results you need to improve your business.

Often, this involves knowing what not to ask in a survey, as well as what you should be asking. With that in mind, here are three things that don’t belong in your survey.

Avoid double-barrelled questions

When writing a survey, it can be tempting to combine two different questions into one, creating a double-barrelled question.

While this might seem appealing, it is also a sure-fire way to confuse and distract your survey participants. No matter how great the temptation, every survey question should be limited to a single issue, with no room for confusion. This means that your survey responses will be accurate and precise, making them more useful to your company.

Redundant questions

Sometimes surveys will include questions that don’t serve any real purpose, but have slipped in from an over-eager planner. While this might seem harmless, having an excessively long survey with a lot of redundant questions will only irritate your recipients.

The solution is to divide your questions into ‘essential’ and optional’ ones. Prioritise the essential questions and only include the optional ones if there is a good business case for gathering this information.

Long Questions

When it comes to answering a survey, time is money. Excessively long survey questions are an easy way to potentially turn off readers who won’t want to wade through long fields of text before they can answer.

At the most extreme end, excessively long questions can leave people with no commitment to the survey, leaving them answering without fully understanding the question you are asking them.

The only solution is to keep your survey questions short, sharp and to-the-point. This will keep your questions engaging and make them as easy as possible to answer.

To get expert help when it comes to designing your next survey, make sure you request a free demo from PeoplePulse.